Mark wrote:
"Whenever there are any linguistic issues with an English-language film
-- thick accents, slang, difficult language (Shakespeare) -- I recommend
using the English subtitles if they are available on the DVD, which they
increasingly are."
Are they usually accurate? I find it very distracting when the
subtitles or closed captioning vary from the spoken words.
Of course, they're still usually more understandable than the subtitles
on Chinese issued Hong Kong films. I remember the first time I came
across "I'm" as a complete sentence. Finally realized it meant: "I am."
I found it very amusing in Better Tomorrow II when the English subtitles
were nowhere near the English words spoken by Chow Yun Fat in the New
York sequence (same thing with evil British colonialists in "historical"
kung fu films). It was obviously a several generation translation:
Chinese scriptwriter's words translated to spoken English, back to
Chinese subtitles, and finally to English subtitles.
Mark
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